Pages

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Is a very humbling experience, it is exhilarating, fun and exhausting at the same time! It makes you think, it makes you re-evaluate everything you do as a teacher, it makes you reflect. So yes, I am a student again, I enrolled in a Master Program from Gothenburg University in Sweden called "Learning, Communication and IT" and I am having a blast! What about you, have you gone back to school or experienced any amazing PD? I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on that!

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

"Math Monsters" is a fun math fact application for your iPad geared towards elementary students. You start by creating your "monster" player, then choose between 3 skill levels (beginner, amatuer and professional) then finally select the mission, here you choose between Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. Start the game and you will see a "bingo" board. The math fact is displayed on the top (for example 2+4) and your job is to find the correct answer on the board. Choose the correct answer and the "monster" will show it self! But wait, I see the number 6 displayed several times! That is OK, you can only pick it one at a time and your job is to answer the math facts correctly and make sure you get "bingo" by choosing the right answers in a row!

Thursday, May 10, 2012

I have for a long time been promoting the use of Skype in the classroom and finally I stumbled on the perfect project. On the Skype in education website I found a Yellowstone park ranger that was looking to Skype with classrooms all over the world and share the wonders of the magnificant national park. One of our brave 2nd grade teachers Mrs. Hartley volunteered to try it out! Her class was currently studying the State of Maine, so we decided to do a compare and contrast between Yellowstone and Maine. First Mrs. Hartley and I did a test Skype so that the students got used to the medium, Mrs. Hartley also prepared her class, she had all her students write down questions for the ranger. Finally the day approached for the Skype conversation! It was a success, ranger Beth Tyler was the natural teacher, it was like having her right there in the classroom, she showed the students artifacts and photos and kept them engaged the whole time, Check it out in action by clicking the video below!

The funny unexpected twist to our whole experience came after the principal posted the video link on our schools facebook page, all of a sudden he got a message from Skype asking if they could use our video on their newly revamped Skype in Education home page!! We obtained all the necessary permissions and now we are the "see it in action" video clip on their homepage!!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

If you are like me, have a crazy inbox then here are some helpful tips from Google to tame your e-mail inbox!!

ARCHIVE your e-mail
Does
your Inbox have more that 100 messages? 500 messages? Maybe even
thousands? If so, you’ve got a case of Inbox Bloat! There’s really no
reason to keep all that email in your Inbox. It’s much easier to archive
your old messages. Why? Archiving helps you:

Better manage your Inbox by keeping it neat, tidy, and uncluttered.

Reduce
your stress level. Many people tend to feel overwhelmed when their
Inbox is full of old messages. By reducing your Inbox to only new
messages, or messages you need to deal with soon, your workload doesn’t
seem so insurmountable.

Have
a sense of accomplishment. Think about it - if your Inbox contained
only a few messages, wouldn’t you feel like you accomplished something?

You can still quickly see all your e-mail by clicking the label "all email"

Here is a link to and easy tutorial on how to archive your e-mailPRIORITY INBOXHave you tried the priority inbox feature??
You might find your self much more productive using the priority inbox
feature. Try it out by using these instructions:FILTERS & LABELSDo you need to quickly find that
e-mail from your grade level team member? Or where is that important
e-mail from David? Learn how to organize your e-mail by applying filters
and labels with this easy quick to do tutorial!DRAG and DROP labels and messages
Learn how to quickly utilize your labels by dragging them to messages or
dragging the messages to your labels by using this quick tutorial:This is were I found all these tips and there are more!http://learn.googleapps.com/tips-and-tricks/tips-and-trick

Saturday, May 5, 2012

BloggingIf you have been thinking of using a blog for your self as a teacher to share resources or to use with your students. Keep on reading here are some helpful tips and tricks that I have compiled for you!

I was trying out different blogging
tool to see what would be the easiest for teachers to use especially if
you have never blogged before. I set up my own account to see how easy
it would be to navigate, customize and figure out how to make posts so
that I could teach others how to do it. I don't mind winging it when I
am helping people but it is nice to know that I have seen the interface
before.

retrieved from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2595497078/

Anyway, if you are brand new to blogging and are not planning on having your whole class blog with you, then I think www.blogger.com
might be the vehicle for you. It is run by google so it integrates
seamlessly with googles other tools. Maybe I am impartial because I have
been using many of the google tools including Google Docs and Gogle
Apps for education. I have learned the interface and how works so it is
now second nature to me.

I continued my blogging journey and
noticed that when I read blogs and even website many of them used
wordpress. I really liked how completely different and how very
professional many of these blogs looked like so I set up a wordpress
account as well. When I googled wordpress I encountered 2 websites. www.wordpress.org and www.wordpress.com.
So what was the difference between the two? Easy... wordpress.com is a
quick set up, hosted by wordpress on their server and fairly easy to set
up, it is web-based, so therefor you can add posts to it as long as you
have access to the internet.

Wordpress.org was a little more complex,
you need to download the wordpress blogging application, install it on
your computer, find a webhost for your blog (costs money) then start
blogging. If you are friendly with the IT people at your school they
might allow you to host your blog on the school server.
I then turned my eyes to blogging tools used by teachers with their students and the first one I encountered was edublogs.org Edublogs
was pretty easy to set up, the interface looked exactly like wordpress
so I suspect they are partners. I liked the fact that you as a teacher
can upgrade your account and for $3/month get 50 student accounts to
your classblog. $3 per month is not a lot of money but it is still money
for a teacher to shell out. Maybe they can get it paid for by the
school but with budget cuts and so forth I am not so sure about that.I
also looked at what controls the teacher had in form of monitoring
comments and monitoring who can access the blogs. Different schools have
different policies on displaying students work so I wanted to make sure
you could make it really secure. Edublogs fulfilled my requirements in
that arena.

Another blogging tool I looked at was classbloggmeister.com a
blogging tool provided by David Warlick and the Landslide project. I
looked at that one mainly because my favorite Kindergarten Teacher Maria
Knee from Derfield, NH uses it to blog with her kids. I know it is
secure and allows for many controls. This is where I got a little
frustrated, I tried to sign up for an account but it keept asking me for
a school pass code and it did not give any further instructions. I
have now e-mailed David Warlick to see what my next step should be.

The final classroom blogging tool I looked at was kidblog.org.
This application is very bare bones, but super easy to use. So for
those of you that just wants to have a forum for your students to blog
but don't care about it being flashy and fancy, this is the tool for
you! Here is a link to my friend Mr. Gagnon, he uses it with his 3rd
grade class! http://kidblog.org/mrgagnonsclass/
Please feel free
to comment to this post and add suggestions for other blogging tools I
should explore. I did look into the blog feature offered by Apple as
part of the iWeb application. However, many features like comments etc
is only available if you host it on Apple's own mobile me server.

VoiceThread is a neat web 2.0 tool that allows you to post images,
videos and have people around the world comment on them like an online
discussion.
It is a great tool to use in the classroom, I know a
language arts teacher that had her Spanish Students describe a picture,
they then sent the link to a school in Costa Rica and the students there
got to critique the American Spanish Students pronunciation.
Right
now I am trying to come up with some cool projects we could do in the
elementary school. I was thinking that Flat Stanley would be a great
one, first picture is of Flat Stanley in his home classroom with all the
students wishing him a safe journey. When they mail Flat Stanley to the
world they will also send the Voice Thread link and the people that
receives Flat Stanley will take a picture of him, add a comment that the
students can listen to, they can then post some additional questions to
the recipient of Flat Stanley, Hmm some thoughts.
Anyway here is
my first attempt on the fly. I was thinking that elementary kids could
post pictures of their pets or favorite animal and then talk about why
they like it. They can then go on and comment on other peoples pictures.
Please help me out, click on my Voice Thread, leave me a comment or
even better upload your own animal photo and comment!
Thanks

I got a tip from a friend to check out storybird!
A
great online collaborative website where you can create books and
publish them online! You can use other people's art work (all supplied
to you by the website) or upload your own. It is an amazing starting
point for young writers that are struggling to put words on the paper.
It was so quick and easy to make a book, I made and Alien book with the
help of my son Max in less than 2 minutes. Please be the first one to
read it and give us some feedback!

Friday, May 4, 2012

I recently went to an Apple workshop. The Apple trainers bombard you
with information, their fingers flies over the keyboards and they make
everything look sooooo amazingly easy including making an ePub (an
electronic book to be read on your iPad or any other mobile device)!
They show you how easy it is to create a cool interactive lab
instruction (including video) for your students to download on to their
mobile devices!

Wow!
me and my co-worker where pumped, we need to do this with her fist
graders! How cool turn their "all about.." into an ibook made by the
students with their own video narration. Lets do it! I went to her
classroom picked a couple of kids books, decided it was easier to
photograph their pages as opposed to scanning them. Problem number 1...
the pages looked all grey!, the camera read all the white on the page
and made it grey. I went back to her classroom change the settings on my
camera to underexpose all the pictures by EV settings +1/3 t0 +2 (you
need to experiment with this). No I don't use a fancy camera, just a
basic cannon digital point and shoot, if you read the manual you can
fine tune some of your controls!

The pictures came out a little bit
better. I opened up Pages, I inserted all the pictures into Pages,
changed the settings as Apple suggested and started to export as an
ePub. I transferred the ePub to my iPad.... opened up iBook and voila
there it was! A beautiful book about Dinosaurs.. but wait, what happened
to the last 3 pages? Gone!! I did the process over and over, I shut
down all the programs, rebooted the computer, exported, reexported,
spend several hours but could never get the last 3 pages to appear! I am
stumped! So.. dear readers of this blog, does anyone have any
suggestions to me for why this is happening? One thing I still need to
explore is the size limitations of the ePub... maybe the picture files
are to big and all together the exceed the size limitations?

Anyway I have not given up on it! I will keep exploring and coming up with new ways of using ePub in the elementary schools!

Blog Archive

About Me

I am a Mom, Educator, Technology Integrator and a Photographer. I love learning, creating and sharing my thoughts, discoveries and ideas of fun and exciting ways to use and integrate technology into the curriculum!